From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2006-12-01T06:57:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Wisdom of including Rakefile in releases


Jason Roelofs wrote:
> Rakefiles allow users to run the tests for themselves, to understand how a
> library is put together, etc. The only thing that can go wrong is that the
> stuff doesn't work (unless you're grabbing very untrustworthy packages, but
> assumptions have to be made somewhere). Not to mention, having the Rakefile
> there allows other people to properly make changes to a library if / when
> they need to.
>
> I don't see anything bad with including said Rakefiles. Do you have any
> specific worries?

Yes. For instance I have a little backup task that I sometimes use to
make an archival copy of my project. I'll use it when I'm about to try
out another build task that could potentially screw my project up if I
made some mistake (rarely used but I try to be cautious). The backup
gets saved in a special directory just above the project directory
which obviously won't exist on someone elses system in their gem
folder.

Another example is a task for uploading the project's website to a
host. I'm not inclined to distribute my projects website with the dist.
release and I don't expect anyone to be using that task buyt me.

Granted these tasks will generally just fail rather then do any harm,
but since they won't work it indicates to me they should not be
distributed in the first place. after all, a dist. realease is inteded
for usage only. If one wishes to work with the code they should pull
down a copy of the repository. But then again , maybe that distinction
isn't such a good one, in particluar for open source software.

T.